Reverberations

Sixteen. What does it bring up for you? If you took an elevator to your sixteenth year, what scene you would walk in on?

My elevator brings me to an early morning in November 1985, a room tinged with kerosene, sweat, and mildew. A girl and a baby lie on a bloodied bed. The girl is naked from the waist down, the baby still attached. This is liminal moment, the quietness between the drama of birth and the eventual arrival of paramedics. There is no way to escape. I am hollow inside.

My mother’s elevator travels to an early summer evening in 1966. The doors open to an emergency room, the nose-pricking scent of charred flesh cut with colloidal silver and antiseptic surrounding her father. He lies on a bed, his face green, his ears melted away. Fighting the urge to flee, she freezes in place.

These scenes, moments of stillness after trauma, allude to larger stories embedded in complex lives. I suspect the two events are linked, that my mother’s trauma at sixteen was fuel for my own. It didn’t start with my mother, of course (my focus here is matrilineal). The experiences of my adoptive and biological grandparents filter through my mother to me. Soaked in experiences of loss, abandonment, and the stark knowledge that safety is not guaranteed, my upbringing has informed my relationships. It can show in the ways I express love, trust, and affection, in how I interpret others’ intentions and emotions.

We cannot fully escape the pain of those who came before us – and we sometimes benefit from their good fortune and joyful, empathetic ways. Experiences, emotions, and patterns of coping get transmitted across generations. They emerge unconsciously in how we relate to others, expect to be treated, and in the faith we have in the world. Often these patterns assert themselves without our awareness. They bloom to life unexpectedly, appearing in a shifting mood, an intense reaction, in some of the choices we make to kick free of familiar ties.

The trickiest way my past expresses itself within me is in my often unconscious, unprocessed responses to my child. The boy is 16 himself now, almost through that delicate, liminal year. The neglected 16-year-old in me, wounded and alone, sometimes emerges in our interactions. She’s fiery and small and full of shame. This girl feels shut out, unimportant, excluded. She carries the weight of neglect, the knowledge of her intrinsic badness, like a chunk of anthracite suspended in her hollow chest. She knows that love is not guaranteed, that she will be abandoned eventually, that she doesn’t matter. It takes self-awareness and inward-facing love to soothe her while continuing to parent like an adult. Sometimes I don’t succeed.

The stillbirth I had at sixteen was embedded in a series of circumstances. The paramedics eventually took me to the hospital. My baby was cleaned up and briefly placed in my arms. I was back to school in a week, with most of my friends and peers none the wiser. I returned to my unchaperoned living situation, returned to the room in the cottage where it all happened.

My grandfather survived the industrial fire that burned over 90% of his body. He lost a foot and his hearing, spent nine months in the hospital and nine with an at-home nurse. My mother returned to school in the fall, did the things that teenagers do, went on with life as usual.

These events reverberate. They echo. I write them down to capture them, to subdue them, to fully embed them in the past.

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The idea of taking an elevator to a particular age was as a prompt in a recent poetry retreat my mother attended. One of the first images that came to her was seeing her father in the hospital immediately after his accident. Though I grew up knowing the general story, hearing about her reaction in that moment brought home the horror and pain of it all. My own story of sixteen, something I’ve written about extensively and yet still find difficult to engage with emotionally, came to mind. What does a kid do when the unthinkable has happened? How does it affect them going forward? How does it show up in their parenting later on? And how can the intergenerational transmission of trauma be interrupted?

These topics are on my mind, both as they apply to me and to others. I’m still working through them, so think of this as a draft.

The word artist

Back in my early twenties, when I was teetering into adulthood on not-quite stable legs, a film-making coworker approached me with a proposal. It involved smoldering and smoking, silence and tension, a bottled-up version of me filmed in black and white, riding scooters, taking deep drags off cigarettes, and enigmatically letting the smoke obscure me further.

We never made the movie. The point of it all escapes me, though in retrospect he clearly had a smoking fetish. But I do remember this idea of my containment, how I kept parts of myself under wraps. I carried tension just below the surface, ready to blow.

Thirteen years ago, I exploded. Words thrummed from my fingertips. I was compelled to create. In the process, I worked through some trauma, put a lot of my past to rest, went back to grad school, and became a therapist. The turmoil I created in my personal life during this intense time eventually died down–as did the writing.

I recently reread some early entries from this blog, writing from those gritty days of lava and ash, long since deleted from the online repository. Intensity and longing vibrate off the page. I no longer identify with that version of me, caught up in words and feelings. Or perhaps parts of that person feel too messy and unpredictable. To give in to her intensity would shake up my current equilibrium. Stability trumps emotional and artistic expression.

I grew up with an idea about what it meant to be a writer, about what went into being a word artist. Real writers were cruel and chauvinistic. They relied on the support of those whose self-sacrifice they both expected and insulted. Writers dealt in instability. Unprocessed trauma was their bread and butter, and they fed off anger and lust. My early writing didn’t totally spring from this dysfunctional well, though I was angry and desperate to be seen, bruises, scars and all. Through my writing, I did not ignore my trauma. Instead I processed it, worked through its antecedents, and fully entered adulthood. Writing had done its job. My life was in order. I boxed away my aching need for expression and exposure.

Muffling creativity and emotion, however, does not eliminate them. I continue to struggle with the tension between the creative, emotional life I crave and the comfort and solidity of being a stable, reliable person. Though this is a false dichotomy, the model of writer as a self-centered blunderer still operates in the shadows.

What happens when parts of you remain disavowed? They creep out at night. They laden your dreams with bizarre symbolism, cars that sink into waterfalls, men you once knew stalking your sleep. Traces remain in your waking hours, tingles of limbs gone fast asleep and trying to return to life. A heavy numbness weighs down your mind and traps your fingers. Weekends pass in a stupor of work and static.

I must approach this life one word at a time, one mundane, but important task at a time, one alive thought followed up by action at a time. I hold these disparate pieces of myself, the melodramatic, the calm, the wounded, the creative, the egotist, the self-sacrificer while I continue to create a whole life. A writer’s life. A mother’s life. A partner’s life. A psychotherapist’s life. To live fully, I have no choice but to create some sort of balance, to make space to write and be myself authentically.

The things that don't exist

Some days are lucky, rippled with sweetness. Yesterday afternoon, me on the couch, a dog to either side, my 16-year-old son decompressing across the room, my husband working nearby … It was sweet proximity, availability, warmth. This morning, we are in a similar configuration, each working on our own stuff, each present. Here we are. We are alive and healthy, we are family, and there are others here and there, a small group, but existent and walking the earth.

At night when I can’t sleep, or when I wake up at some ridiculous time, barely post-midnight, I am thrust into my deepest anxieties. I envision a future completely alone, family dead, the boy (god willing) living his life to the fullest in the faraway. This night-thinking future is inevitable. Come daylight, it returns to mirage. But primal anxiety leaves its mark, its mood discolorations. My wellbeing is perpetually contused and tender.

I know enough of the signs to recognize depression. My energy levels are low, my sleep is shot. Sometimes I feel hopeless, worthless. I imagine the relief of death (without a desire to make that a reality). Getting stuff done is difficult. Some days are better, some worse. The feelings ratchet up over my work week as each day intensifies and emotions build up with no relief. 

Then Friday arrives, a day when I don’t see clients. I start to decompress. I see more of my family. Sometimes sleep improves, sometimes it doesn’t. Other worries and meta-wounds emerge from my subconscious, friendships on the fritz, feelings of being unseen, unheard, unknown. By this time on Saturday, I’m a little more clear-headed, though so much remains to do.  

I don’t want to do it. I want to return to the good parts of childhood, a slow afternoon and a good book, an expanse of future, a person in the kitchen making me dinner, a dog I don’t need to walk or feed lying across from me on the floor, brown eyes gazing into mine, and nothing is real, except for the things we don’t talk about, which, for a moment or two, my fingers against the dog’s fur, our expressions intent and serious, don’t exist.

The Brontës and me

Jane Eyre was one of my favorite books as a kid, the memorable Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles movie version providing the visuals for its gothic intensity. In the taffy slow early days of the pandemic, I reread Charlotte Brontë’s classic, as well as her sister Emily’s harder-to-stomach Wuthering Heights. I went on a Brontë binge, reading biographies and articles about the family, their quirks and talents. The Brontës lived hard lives in hard times, none of the siblings making it to 40. Lately I’ve gotten caught up in the topic again, my 1:30am (or earlier!) insomnia bouts spent reading Claire Harman’s biography of Charlotte, A Fiery Heart.

Paging through the book feels strangely familiar. I already know the facts. Is this a re-read, my first go-round wiped out by pandemic stress? Did I crack open some similar biography between then and now? Everything new is old again. What strikes me this time around is the determination of the three spinster sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Stuck at home with a dissipated brother and uninvolved curate father (their mother and two other sisters long dead), these women knew they had to take care of business. Money was tight. Remaining governesses or schoolteachers was unappealing. So the sisters decided to become published authors. Their first step was to have a collection of their poetry printed pseudonymously. From there they worked together (and sometimes separately) to write and shop their subsequent manuscripts out to publishers.

As the siblings were working on their publishing plan, their brother died of tuberculosis. Not long after their books were published, Emily and Anne succumbed to the disease.. About six years after later Charlotte passed away at 38, likely due to severe morning sickness.

The Brontës were a peculiar, self-contained set of siblings, from childhood onward caught up in writing elaborate and fantastical stories. Creation was part of how they navigated and tolerated the world. But why am I so taken their determination and penurious circumstances? Perhaps I need inspiration, a reminder to stay the course (or to at least get on the boat).

 I, dear reader, am also about to become a published author. What I have written has little in common with Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Because it is in the self-help and self-development genre, it does not tell a melodramatic story or dazzle the mind with its extended and deep metaphors. But I worked hard at it, tried my best to make it useful and well-written, and got paid to do it. Having a deadline and a writing structure kept me going. It got me published by an actual publisher in a way that this blog, something I’ve been writing in for almost fourteen years, did not. 

Over the years, I’ve grappled with how I could do the sort of writing I enjoy, the stuff that shows up on writing survive, in a more public way, to allow the personal to exist within the professional. This brings up internal conflicts and questions. What does it mean to share my inner thoughts as a psychotherapist? What if this is terribly unprofessional? What happens if a client or a colleague reads this blog? Will anyone, outside of the perhaps three people who are longtime readers, care about what I write? What is the point of writing—here, or anywhere else? How do I make this authentic and yet appealing to others? What if my authenticity is unappealing to others?

Perhaps I think too much. Ultimately, I’d like to write here more often, and not completely anonymously. I don’t want to make a big deal out of this tentative plan or spend too much time crafting my posts. But I hope to slowly meld the personal and professional into something that has a shape and form, has a life of its own, and is authentically mine.

(Oh – and my book is called 52-Week Grief Journal:  Prompts and Reflections for Navigating Loss. For more information, take a look at amazon.)

Burnout

Lately, though a combination of a complicated home life, not having real time off for two and a half years, taking on a good (but time-consuming) writing project, dealing with what the rest of the world and country are dealing with, and perhaps getting inadvertently “triggered” by an ongoing situation, not to mention the death of Lorca – and the positive, yet stressful introduction of another galgo, Miguel, just last week . . . where was I? Oh, yes. A relative’s terminal illness, the ongoing housing of that relative, a stressful, emotionally draining job during a global pandemic, spending way too much time writing a book about how to process grief, a dead dog, a new dog, no time off, no fun time, the deletion of real family time . . . I am burned out.

I read about reincarnation and near-death experiences. I wonder about the expansiveness of consciousness and the interconnected nature of all things. I get caught up in Buster Keaton movies, drawn to that expressive face and the quietness of silence, a piano soundtrack to keep time with whatever is going on in my soul, the ghost in my machine. Body is mind, but mind is not body. My body attempts not to give up the ghost.

This is what I’ve been thinking lately (lately being this week) – what if I left my work behind? Stayed at home, tapped out my thoughts, attended to dogs and the home? The boy, big now and boisterous, doesn’t need me in the same way, and that’s ok. He’ll be gone soon, perhaps for good. But there is plenty to occupy me here, and without the noise of other peoples’ thoughts, the words could flow again

So, what does the rest of this life look like for this imprisoned ghost? How should I shape what remains of my career attending to the emotional needs of others? Am I in service or am I in connection? Yesterday, worn from everything, I decided to take a day off. Walks with my husband and the pups, a little Pilates, a lot of Buster Keaton, and very little work.  And here I am, writing. Thank goodness.